7 simple ideas to bring the holiday spirit to your intranet

It’s almost that time of the year again: Christmas and New Year are coming. 

While the holiday season is mostly about connecting with family, it’s a great time to connect with colleagues too. In this blog post, I share seven ideas to use your intranet to boost company culture and communication over the holiday season.  

Give employees the holiday vibes by spreading it throughout your intranet. It can be done by putting up some festive decorations. Change the background with a festive color, add a snow effect to your homepage, adapt your logo with Christmas elements, add a widget to count down to Christmas or New Year,… Be creative and bring some of the holiday spirit to your people. 

According to experts, these little touches do more than add color and cheer; they do wonders for our morale, too. 

The holiday season is the fun season, so why not having some fun activities on your intranet. A festive competition for example is a good way to engage employees. It’s also an effective way to get employees to the intranet and thus drive more adoption. 

Here are a few competition ideas: 

• A photo contest: pets in festive outfits, ugly Christmas jumpers, Christmas decorations, holiday-themed baking, etc.

• A fun quiz about Christmas, holiday traditions or whatever’s fun.

• A virtual scavenger hunt to seek answers to festive questions or search for Christmas icons that are hidden throughout your intranet.
• An idea box on how the company can best celebrate the holidays.

Using polls is another great way to make your intranet more interactive and engaging. It encourages employee participation and helps you learn more about employees. Particularly during Christmas time, you can get people more excited and engaged by asking them about Christmas-related topics. 

Here are a few suggestions: What is your favorite Christmas song, film, food? Do you own an ugly Christmas sweater? What is the worst Christmas gift to give someone? Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? 

Having an advent calendar is a fun way to count down to Christmas Day. Consider a virtual advent calendar and populate it with interesting company facts, pieces of useful information (healthy eating tips during the holidays, for example), or greetings from each team and department.  

You can make a fun competition out of it too. Each day opens a new question that employees can seek out the answer within the intranet in return for a prize.  

Consider creating a gallery on your intranet where everyone can share their festive working-from-home photos. It’s a fun way to get to know each other on another level. 

This time of the year is also when many team-building activities happen. Keep these memories alive by adding them to a photo gallery on your intranet.  

Not everyone celebrates the same religious festivals, but everyone wraps up the year and looks forward. So this is a great time to thank employees and recognize their contribution and effort. You can also summarize the year’s highs and lows and talk about opportunities for the future.  

Think about how to motivate employees and keep their mood level high when preparing your festive message. It’s also important to tie it to your strategic message. And of course; share it on your intranet so you reach all employees, wherever they are. 

Video’s get more engagement than text, especially if they are fun. So how about making a light-hearted video to bring out the festivity and celebration? It’s a tremendous way to make your culture shine. 

Need some inspiration? Simply google “corporate holiday videos”. You will find plenty of ideas to get inspired. You only need a fun idea and a smartphone to get started. And tools like Canva, JibJab and Moovly are great to help you produce your videos fast and easily. 

Don’t stress about the video production. Instead, spend your time working on the content and on how to make it authentic and fun. 

With these 7 suggestions, I hope that you can find a few ideas that fit with your culture. Some may be out of your comfort zone but remember; great things never came from comfort zones. Whatever you decide to do, be sure to plan ahead, get buy-in and just execute.